Binding practices

In Smith’s time, books were often issued in inexpensive publisher’s bindings or “boards.” The first edition of Wealth of Nations was published on March 9, 1776, by William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in two quarto volumes, selling for £1.16.0 in blue-grey or marbled boards.Footnote ⁵ Today that would not buy a cup of coffee, but in the late eighteenth century, it was beyond the means of most people.Footnote ⁶ This book was therefore initially for a very limited audience of prosperous readers. They often had their books rebound to protect the book more fully and/or to reflect their style. An example is a copy owned by Edward Hawke Locker.Footnote ⁷ This copy is handsomely bound in leather with Locker’s crest in gold on the front. Beneath a stag are the owner’s initials (“EHL”), encircled by “Fear God and Fear Nought,” the motto on the Locker family’s coat-of-arms. The spines of both volumes feature gilt lettering and decoration. The binding therefore personalizes the Wealth of Nations, reflecting the taste, family status, and affluence of its owner (see Appendix 1).

In the nineteenth century, new wealth and technologies led to more readers and more affordable books. The development of dust jackets, initially to protect books, evolved into a marketing tool and even art.Footnote ⁸ As the twentieth century progressed, so did the forms of such cover art, with audiobooks offering visual interpretations on CD cases, MP3 disks, and websites. The advent of digital readers in the twenty-first century further expanded the number of editions and covers. Because Wealth of Nations is in the public domain, anyone can now publish—and profit from!—a new edition.Footnote ⁹

As prosperity spread, twentieth-century publishers tapped into a growing market of readers with time and means. For those who wished to cover gaps in their education, the Wealth of Nations was among the books considered essential in one’s library. It was included in a number of book series, including Harvard Classics, Modern Library, the University of Chicago Great Books Series, Everyman’s Library, the Capstone Series, the Prometheus Books Great Mind series, and the Henry Regnery Company’s Gateway Series, among others. Wealth of Nations also proved popular in luxury book series, which offer a sense of intellectual refinement as well as aesthetic pleasures—leather bindings, marbled endpapers, luxe paper, and book ribbons—all for what we might call a cover charge. Several early book series emerged in later lavish versions. The Harvard Classics 1963 “Deluxe” edition of Wealth of Nations is textually identical to the abridged edition of 1909, but it includes marbled endpapers and a more elaborate cover. The Harvard shield is heavily stylized with gilt tooling; this still bears “VERITAS,” but it is truth literally shining with glory. The Great Books Series likewise reappeared in a leather-bound “limited edition” published in 1978 by the Franklin Press, complete with navy moiré endpapers, gilt page edges, and a leather binding with decorative raised bands. A more recent edition published by Gryphon in 2021 as part of The Classics of Liberty Library offers not only luxury, but also a sense of intellectual refinement and patriotism.Footnote ¹⁰ The lavishly illustrated three-volume 2008 edition by the Folio Society presents both visual pleasure and the tactile experience of a cover bound in brown buckram, a coarse cloth often used in Smith’s time to make corsets.Footnote ¹¹

Such editions may not appeal to readers simply interested in what Adam Smith says. In fact, given Smith’s fame, it is unsurprising that Smith eventually transformed from a beau in his books to a beau on them. Many editions feature a portrait of Smith on the front cover, signaling that in purchasing Wealth of Nations, one obtains the expertise of one of history’s most brilliant intellectuals. Examples include editions by Gateway (1953; 4th printing, n.d.), the University of Chicago Press (1976), Modern Library (1994), Dover Publications (2002), Arc Manor (2008), Philosopher’s Stone (2010), Tantor Unabridged Classics Audiobook (2010), The Free Market Economic Press digital edition (2011), The Kirkcaldy Edition (2012), Coterie Classics digital edition (2016), and ClassicBooks by KTHTK digital edition (2023). While the covers feature the same man (and often the same portrait), they style Smith’s brand in distinctive ways. The Philosopher’s Stone edition depicts Smith as literally out of this world, his portrait floating over a nebula. Arc Manor’s cover for Book I of the Wealth of Nations and The Communist Manifesto includes miniature portraits of Smith, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. To avoid the appearance of bias, the publisher thoughtfully uses equal portions of blue and pink on the background.

As these examples show, editions of Wealth of Nations may appeal to our desire for general knowledge, luxury, and/or the expertise of a great thinker. In doing so, editions of Smith’s Wealth of Nations are hardly unique. What makes other covers for this book especially interesting is how they debate the subjects signaled in Smith’s title: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

From cashing in to uncovering prosperity

The first problem is the nature of wealth. The covers of many recent editions align Smith’s book with the view that a nation’s wealth consists in gold or money. For instance, the cover of the 2020 Vintage Classics edition is dominated by a bar of gold stamped “THE WEALTH OF NATIONS” and “NET WT 470 g.” However, Smith rejects theories that equate precious metals with a nation’s wealth: “Spain and Portugal, the countries which possess the mines, are, after Poland, perhaps, the two most beggarly countries in Europe” (WN I.xi.n.1). He further clarifies that “wealth does not consist in money, or in gold and silver, but in what money purchases, and is valuable only for purchasing” (WN IV.i.17). Nevertheless, like Vintage Books, many small and independent presses mistakenly equate wealth with currency. An audiobook edition from 2021 uses ancient coins. An “Annotated Edition” from 2022 prints the title, indication of Books I–III, and author’s name over a pile of U.S. dollars, while another independently published edition from 2023 prints Smith’s title and name over a sheaf of hundred dollar bills. One need not understand how the market works to benefit from it.

Yet the most interesting editions may be two from 2017 whose covers not only misrepresent Smith’s explanation of wealth but then critique it. On one cover published through CreateSpace, a man’s hand extends from a white sleeve covered with a black jacket. He reaches toward a pile of international dollars. This is Gordon Gekko-style greed: every man—or perhaps every white businessman—seizes what he can.Footnote ¹² The 2017 Digireads edition goes further, indicting a whole culture. Its cover image is Carl Hassmann’s The Almightier, a critique of capitalism and organized religion published in Puck on May 15, 1907. The cathedral is full of wealthy, expensively dressed people. In place of the rose window is a dollar sign, suggesting that the congregation worships wealth rather than God. Although ready to profit from Smith’s book—this paperback sells for $19.99—the publisher shows no evidence of having read it.

Others are more willing to do so in editions celebrating Smith’s arguments about increasing wealth for all. Prosperity is a theme in multiple editions. Smith argues, “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (WN I.i.10). Consider the edition published in Barnes & Noble’s 2004 Library of Essential Reading. A picture of the New York skyline from the 1920s dominates the front cover (Keystone/Getty Images). In the upper right, a construction worker leans over the skyline, grasping a steel beam with one hand while waving with the other. His pose invites viewers to join him in celebrating the evidence of creation in which he literally had a hand. The back cover explains the significance of the Wealth of Nations, which “is widely credited with laying the theoretical and philosophical foundations for capitalism” and which “presents a powerful blueprint for a stable and peaceful society which rests upon a hard-headed and realistic assessment of humans and their nature.” This emphasis on realism, like the image of the construction worker, situates Smith’s theories in the realm of the everyday. Smith does not promise that his theories will make life perfect or even safe. Rather, he suggests how life could be better for people in general, from the architect to the laborer to the reader.

The Modern Library Paperback edition of 2000 emphasizes prosperity as well as its causes in a cover designed by Emily Mahon. In an interview with Forbes, Mahon clarifies how modern designers have a hand in shaping readers’ first impressions. The art director for the Modern Library series asked her for “a fresh vision for the series. I tried several options and they loved the look of the type encased in a white silhouette laid over much more contemporary artwork than had been used previously.”Footnote ¹³ For the Wealth of Nations, the artwork is a woodblock by Ray Morimura, and the “white silhouette” is shaped as a hand. The uplifted palm above beautifully maintained fields might suggest the distribution of wealth, thereby evoking the “invisible hand” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which the rich landlord is led to distribute the necessaries of life.Footnote ¹⁴ Likewise, this invisible (helping) hand appears in the Wealth of Nations, where a businessman pursues his own interest, and Smith notes, “by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (WN IV.ii.9). Here, the invisible hand leads to the maximization of wealth. Yet how is wealth to be achieved? Book covers depict a range of answers, highlighting debates about Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Cashing in: The causes of wealth

Perhaps the most contentious issues in these covers of Wealth of Nations are the causes and consequences of creating wealth. While some editions visually critique practices that harm the environment and workers, others extol the benefits of commerce and the human propensity to make bargains. The cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of 2008, which features a detail from Industrial Smoke from the Factories of Sheffield, Yorkshire (England) (c. 1920, Mary Evans Picture Library) belongs to the former category (see Appendix 2). Over twenty funnels spew fumes into the air while lights in numerous factory windows intimate unseen workers. This framing connects industrialization with a wealth of pollution, a long-standing association in that region. As detailed in Sources for the Study of Sheffield’s Battle for Clean Air, “Concern over Sheffield’s air quality stretches back at least 400 years. As early as 1608 Sir John Bentley expected to be ‘half choked with town smoke’ while visiting Sheffield.” The problem persisted into the nineteenth century: “The Sanitary Act of 1866 permitted local sanitary authorities to take action against smoke nuisances.” In 1875 the Public Health attempted to curb pollution nationally. Finally, “the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act 1926 allowed local authorities to form joint committees to tackle air pollution from industry.”Footnote ¹⁵ In this context, the 1920 painting on this cover reinforces an argument against businesses harming the environment in England generally and Sheffield particularly. The back cover extends the critique of business, quoting from the Wealth of Nations in large red type: “People of the same trade seldom meet together … but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (WN I.x.c.27). In this context, wealth is the result of unethical business practices that harm the environment as well as the people.

Other covers featuring factories might inspire various interpretations. The artwork for the 2011 Seedbox Classics edition is drawn from Eduard Biermann’s 1847 Borsig Ironworks. Gray smoke streams from the factory’s flues, contrasting sharply with white clouds in the background. While Biermann’s painting celebrated the success of Borsig Ironworks in the nineteenth century, modern readers might see it differently, particularly in the context of 2011, when warnings about smokestack pollution emerged from the U.S. Government Accountability Office and other sources.Footnote ¹⁶ Martino Publishing’s 2015 edition of the Wealth of Nation also depicts factories, and the image suggests even more possible associations. The front and back cover, all in hues of beige and gray, reproduces J. A. Shearman’s drawing B. T. Babbitt’s Best Soap Factory Buildings in New York next to the Hudson River (c. 1875). Smoke billows from chimneys, while on the streets are horses with buggies and tiny humans. The image could be seen as celebrating manufacturing, or readers today might see only pollution. The tiny figures, dwindling into insignificance on the streets, also might evoke how Sinclair Lewis adopted the name “Babbitt” in his novel satirizing American businessmen. The word now connotes “a person likened to the character George Babbitt, esp. a materialistic, complacent businessman who conforms unthinkingly.”Footnote ¹⁷ Readers must decide for themselves.

Other covers also examine the politics of wealth. The 1961 University Paperback edition published by Methuen presents a cover illustration by Patrick Keely, best known for the posters he created for Britain’s Ministry of Information during World War II.Footnote ¹⁸ Keely uses his trademark stark imagery in depicting a rust-colored oil derrick rising into the sky. The off-center tower seems to loom over the reader, remote and inhuman. The image links the “wealth of nations” to oil supplies, a subject of particular interest to the British at that time due to several factors: the recent founding of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Britain’s close relationship with Kuwait, and Iraq’s 1961 threat to annex Kuwait six days after the official end of British rule on June 19.Footnote ¹⁹ Gregory Winger observes that “at the time of the crisis, Kuwait produced approximately 1,700,000 barrels of oil a day and received annual revenues of $450,000,000. It was the world’s fourth largest oil producer, with the largest known oil reserves in the Middle East—62,000,000,000 barrels or, roughly, all known reserves in the region.”Footnote ²⁰ Iraq did not invade that year, but Kuwait subsequently gained security guarantees from neighboring companies by offering to share oil revenues.

Smith would have been pleased by Britain’s withdrawal from Kuwait, because the Wealth of Nations had a decidedly anti-imperialist bent. Smith’s position is captured on the cover of Volume II of the 1999 Penguin Classics edition edited by Andrew Skinner. The cover image has a detail from Arthur William Devis’s William Dent with His Brother Captain John Dent at His Estate of Tamluk, India (1790, mistakenly identified on this back cover as by his father, Arthur Devis, 1786). As Beth Fowkes Tobin explains, in 1784, Devis arrived in India, where he was “sensitive to India’s landscape and people.” This painting is one of a pair featuring the Dent family. In the other painting, Louisa Dent and Her Children (1790), we see mother and children beneath a tree and, in the background, a Palladian villa. The same villa is in the background of the painting cropped for this edition. The longer title Tobin gives is significant: William Dent with His Brother John and an Indian Landlord, Anand Narain (1790). Tobin argues that these paintings give weight to India. William Dent must pay the Indian owner a fee for the land of his estate: “The presence of the Indian landlord, Anand Narain, is a reminder of who the landowners in India really were, and of pre-British landowning economies that were long-lived, well established, and of ancient origin.” The presence of Dent’s brother in military uniform and his orderly behind him “are reminders of British military might and conquered territories.” Tobin concludes that the artist “managed to produce portraits that are almost subversive in that they hint of India’s power to absorb British activity and thereby dilute British authority.”Footnote ²¹ This cover therefore evokes a key theme in the latter part of the Wealth of Nations, where Smith examines mercantilism and colonialism versus the advantages of free trade. Among Smith’s targets is the British East India Company, which he derides especially for their decision to shift from a court of twenty-four directors elected annually to directors chosen for four years, with the expectation they would act with dignity and steadiness.Footnote ²² The back cover of Volume II of this Penguin edition includes a related quotation from the Wealth of Nations: “What encourages the progress of population and improvement, encourages that of real wealth and greatness” (WN IV.vii.b.3). Smith’s remark is followed by editorial commentary on Volume IV as “an incisive examination of the mercantile system” that insists “a laissez-faire approach and free trade are essential to a successful economy.”

Wealth inequality and the abuse of workers feature prominently on many covers of Wealth of Nations. The hardships of American workers during the Great Depression are displayed in the Blackstone Audiobook from 1989. The set of CDs is encased in a box with a cover photograph by Dorothea Lange: “Six Tenant Farmers without Farms, Goodlet, Hardeman County, TX” (1937). Behind the photograph is a faded American flag. The photograph was published in 1939 in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, where Lange notes that the group consists of displaced tenant farmers: “All native Americans, none able to vote because of Texas poll tax. All on WPA.” The nation is neglecting what Lange feels is real wealth: disenfranchised native American farmers. The faded flag suggests disillusionment with American ideals during the Great Depression, while a quotation on the back from Robert L. Heilbroner encourages listeners to align Smith with Marx, both of them determined “to see to the bottom of things.”

Despite growing prosperity at the end of the twentieth century, the tension between industrialists and laborers persists in later covers. The Oxford World’s Classics 1993 edition has a cover portrait by Joseph Wright of the plump, expensively clad industrialist Sir Richard Arkwright. Alert readers might surmise that this portrait relates to the point on the back cover above the portrait’s identification: “Smith not only viewed merchants and manufacturers with deep suspicion, he tempered his celebration of a self-regulating market with a darker vision of the dehumanizing potential of a profit-oriented society.”Footnote ²³ Arkwright was an eighteenth-century inventor and the “father of the factory system.” Modern studies of Arkwright have uncovered “a ruthless businessperson.” The thirteen-hour shifts and noise level in his factories affected his workers, some of whom lost their hearing.Footnote ²⁴ Here, the wealth of nations is associated with the abuse of laborers, and Smith emerges as their champion. The back cover goes further in connecting Smith’s arguments with contemporary politics: “Recently, successive British governments have invoked his policy recommendations of free trade and laissez-faire to aid their extension of privatization and market effectiveness into areas such as health and education.” In this framing, the Wealth of Nations remains relevant to ongoing debates about political economy.

The 2000 Random House edition in the Modern Library Classics Series edited by Robert Reich also emphasizes the role of workers, with a cover designed by Gabrielle Bordwin and featuring Edward Turnbull’s lobby ceiling mural for the Chrysler building: Transport and Human Endeavor. In this painting, a range of people are working and creating. Likewise, the Bantam Classics edition of 2003 focuses on workers with a striking cover image by Doug Fraser, renowned for his graphic-novel style of art. On the left, a woman in a kerchief wears safety goggles around her neck; on the right, a man clutches a wrench in a fist rendered massive by foreshortening. A third man hovers in the background. All three seem to glow proudly. At the bottom of the front cover, the edition notes the inclusion of an “introduction by Alan B. Krueger,” best known as a labor economist and professor at Princeton University who worked under Robert Reich during the Bill Clinton Administration.Footnote ²⁵ Krueger later served during the Barack Obama Administration as U.S. Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and then chair of the U.S. White House Council of Economic Advisers. The cover corresponds with his groundbreaking research on the minimum wage and his book on Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? Footnote ²⁶ The back cover describes Smith’s achievement with the folksy observation: “He argued passionately in favor of free trade, yet stood up for the little guy.”

The emphasis on labor and the role of government persists in later editions of the Wealth of Nations. The “Heritage Illustrated Edition” of 2014 features Seymour Fogel’s mural The Wealth of the Nation (1938). On the left, a man in a suit peers into a microscope while taking notes. At the top, a shirtless man in jeans grasps a lever attached to a machine. Beneath him, a man in short sleeves kneels on the floor while using a compass on a blueprint. Behind him, on the right, two men stride down a walkway in front of a factory with smokestacks; one wears overalls and carries a sledgehammer, while the other carries a toolbox. These men are discovering, operating, creating, and building their world. At first glance, the image seems to depict Smith’s opening point: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour” (WN I.i.1). This artwork, however, has a different inspiration in the Great Depression and the tradition of American Idealism, which was “a paean to the nobility of the average American, be they farmer or worker, and the wonders of economic recovery effected by governmental programs that had their best interests in mind,” and more specifically, “a canvas mirror reflecting America under the paternal hand of [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt.” It was, Jared A. Fogel and Robert L. Stevens explain, “the New Deal in paint. It was art in the service of FDR.”Footnote ²⁷ Fogel’s mural designs for the lobby of the U.S. Social Security Building were titled The Security of the People and, analyzed here, The Wealth of the Nation. Conversely, in his “insecurity designs, Fogel was ostensibly creating a scenario reflecting the miseries of life without Social Security.”Footnote ²⁸ The back cover informs readers that the Wealth of Nations is “just as accessible and enjoyable for today’s readers as it would have been when first published.” In fact, the Wealth of Nations is even more accessible today due to the rise in literacy as well as prosperity.

Prosperity is central to Smith’s argument in the Wealth of Nations: “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (WN I.i.10). The Pelican Classics edition of 1974 suggests why. The cover features a medal commemorating the Wealth of Nations in 1797 (with an image from Hawkley Studio). In the foreground stand signs of industry and the division of labor: a cask, plough, spinning wheel, and tools. In the background, ships connote the expansion of commerce.Footnote ²⁹ At the bottom are two entwined thistles (the symbol of Scotland). The medal both illustrates the critical points in Smith’s book and associates his achievement with Scotland.Footnote ³⁰ The back cover emphasizes Smith’s role in laying the foundations of economic theory and draws readers’ attention to Skinner’s introduction, including his discussion of how Smith offers “a vast analytical system” and a view of society that “was not a merely economic one.”

Ships feature prominently in multiple editions, such as the Everyman’s Library edition of 1975. On the yellow dustjacket we see in the background an apparently thriving city in white. In front of it, two black ships sail toward it, presumably with merchandise. This is a polite and commercial city. And in the foreground we see scenes of the country, including fields, people, and a loaded wagon pulled by eight horses. Everyone is thriving. Likewise, a ship dominates the stark yellow cover of the Titan digital edition of 2015, and boats and ships also feature prominently in the ECCO print edition of the 2022 Dublin fifth edition of Wealth of Nations. The cover features boats and, in the background, ships at a seaside town. It thereby evokes Smith’s point that trade is expanded by the convenience of water carriage.

A similar theme appears in the more lavish dustjacket of the Regnery’s Conservative Leadership Series 1998 edition. An image drawn from Claude Lorrain’s Port Scene with the Villa Medici (1637) wraps across the spine and front cover, both of which identify the author and title: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The use of the full title indicates this edition’s gravitas, while the front cover also foregrounds the economic perspective of this edition: “With the classic introduction by Ludwig von Mises.” The cover art especially associates the wealth of nations with commerce. Multiple ships and boats come and go. In the foreground, figures in a variety of dress evoke the international trade conducted at the port. On the right side, the Villa Medici rises above the port, with magnificent statues across the roof highlighting its opulence. The Villa Medici was not located at the port, but it was situated here in the author’s fancy. The back cover emphasizes “The Economic Wisdom of Adam Smith,” with quotations from the Wealth of Nations linking freedom and prosperity.

Freedom is also the key theme on the cover of the Fall River Press 2022 edition. Here, the title and author’s name dominate the green leatherette cover, framing a substantial quotation from Smith’s Wealth of Nations: “The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which publick and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration” (WN II.iii.31). This quotation frames the Wealth of Nations as a book about individuals and general progress in tension with problematic government policies.

Other editions foreground the role of individuals in what Smith calls the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (WN I.ii.1). Consider the cover image for Volume I of the Penguin edition of 1999. A detail from John Collett’s Covent Garden Piazza and Market (1770–1780) transplants readers into the most famous eighteenth-century market in London. A panorama of individuals buy and sell fruits, vegetables, flowers, and other items. Lest we miss the point, this edition’s back cover quotes from the same chapter: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (WN I.ii.2). The Fingerprint Classics 2021 edition of New Delhi highlights not only “Wealth” but trade, with a paraphrase of Smith in red: “Man is an animal that makes bargains.”Footnote ³¹

Bargaining often includes conversation, a point underscored on the front cover of the Wordsworth Classics in World Literature edition from 2012 (see Appendix 2). It features P. J. Crook’s Money Matters (The Bridgeman Art Library, London, n.d.) above a black background on which is printed the book’s title and author. The painting depicts pairs and trios of people in conversation. The diversity of individuals—young and old, men and women, light-skinned and dark-skinned—suggests that money matters to everyone, and everyone engages in money matters. This image also suggests the interest and dignity of participants in such exchange.

One might compare the cover of the Okitoks 2017 edition, which uses Edgar Degas’s painting Portraits at the Stock Exchange (Portraits à la Bourse) (1879). The central figure is a French banker, Ernest May. Over him leans M. Bolâtre, with whom he considers a paper held by another man. Art historian Carol Armstrong argues that, in this painting,

If that were true, this cover art might evoke Smith’s point noted above: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (WN I.x.c.27). Yet this interpretation raises questions. Why would Degas paint the man who commissioned the painting, Ernest May, as engaged in illicit activities? Furthermore, Marnin Young observes that the painting is set in “the interior trading hall of the Bourse. As a consequence, and despite the existing art historical consensus, the financial dealing of the depicted figures could be, and perhaps should be, construed as above-board, legitimate, and conventional.”Footnote ³³ Such debates among scholars are common, leading to not only opposing articles, but also opposing editions of the Wealth of Nations.

Debating Smith

Here, I consider two sets of editions that implicitly contrast socialist and classical liberal readings of Smith (see Appendix 3). My first example is the dust jacket of the 1937 Modern Library Giant edition edited by Max Lerner. Adam Smith’s name appears at the top, followed by the title. The forward slant of the Wealth of Nations creates graphic tension with the figures leaning backward in the image printed below in red, the color associated with contemporary communist art. Five male workers pull a rope attached to an unseen object. One man’s muscles bulge from the strain, maintaining our focus on the labor. Smith argues that the division of labor increases production, leading to “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (WN I.i.10). This design implies that national wealth might arise from the efforts of laborers but does not extend to them, because here they are literally moving backward. For Marx and his followers, capitalists profit by depriving workers like those on this dust jacket of the real value of their labor. Readers might have sensed this point more immediately in 1937. Two years previously, during a recession with high unemployment, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act): “An act to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce, to create a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and for other purposes.”Footnote ³⁴

The text under the image identifies this book as “The famous Cannan edition, complete and unabridged in one volume, with Cannan’s introduction and notes, a complete index, and a new introduction by Max Lerner, editor of The Nation.” The emphasis on the Cannan edition ensures quality, while the inclusion of material by Lerner, along with his association with The Nation (which favored the New Deal) guarantees a particular liberal assessment. At this time, what Lerner’s student Sanford Lakoff describes as his “early period,” Lerner embraced “the principles of moral and political liberalism but rejected economic liberalism—the liberalism that had sanctioned acquisitiveness and the wasteful and callous tyranny of the economic market.”Footnote ³⁵

The label at the bottom, “A Modern Library Giant,” signals the focus of this series on publishing books of great scholarly weight and length in single-volume editions. The back cover features an icon of the Promethean bringer of enlightenment (also on the spine) along with descriptions of the “aim and scope” of the library. They include “nothing but worthwhile books” at the “Lowest possible price” ($1.10). The series also includes “end papers designed by Rockwell Kent, and title pages by Elmer Adler,” names famous for aesthetics and, in Kent’s case, socialism, as he became a member of the socialist party in 1904 and later exhibited his art in the Soviet Union.

Complementing the visual design, which links Smith with socialism, is Lerner’s introduction, in which he asserts, “like all great books, The Wealth of Nations is the outpouring not only of a great mind, but of a whole epoch.” Smith’s book became a powerful influence:

Lerner observes that Smith “gave a new dignity to greed and a new sanctification to the predatory impulses.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet Smith’s doctrine has been “twisted.” Lerner claims that Smith had

Yet many modern economists, including most recently Jeffrey T. Young, have disputed the claim that Smith has a labor theory of value.Footnote ³⁹ Nevertheless, through visual design and intellectual association, this edition aligns Smith with a 1930s socialist agenda. The series emphasis on new interpretations and affordability provided fodder for later editors of Smith.

Among them was the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who immigrated to the United States in 1940 and later cofounded the Mont Pelerin Society. Mises wrote the preface to the Henry Regnery Company’s Gateway Edition of 1953. Its cover is dominated by a portrait of Adam Smith (courtesy of the Bettmann Archives). The simple design and muted colors evoke classic statuary and enduring ideas, not contemporary politics. Under the author’s name and book’s title is the name of Mises, while at the bottom is the series title (“A Gateway Edition”) along with the price of 95 cents. The back cover features a “Selected List” of titles and authors. The book itself, as the title page indicates, focuses on “Selections, Book I.” This cover subtly opposes the Modern Library Giant edition of 1937 by foregrounding its own elegance, affordability, accessibility, and introduction by a notable Austrian economist.

More directly, Mises challenges Lerner in his introduction, where he disputes the interpretation of Smith by “one of the most passionate advocates of destructionism” in “the Introduction to a cheap edition of the Wealth of Nations.” Lest readers miss the point, he then quotes from Lerner’s introduction to the Giant edition. Mises emphasizes that Smith’s books perfected lines of thought developed by previous writers that laid the keystone of a whole system of ideas: “They presented, with admirable logical clarity and in an impeccable literary form, the essence of the ideology of freedom, individualism, and prosperity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather than suggesting that Smith gives “dignity to greed,” Mises argues that Smith “opened the way for capitalist mass production for the needs of the masses. Under capitalism the common man is the much-talked-about customer who ‘is always right.’” Mises concludes by emphasizing that one must continue by studying modern economics: “Smith sapped the prestige of eighteenth-century government controls. He does not say anything about the controls of 1952 and about the Communist challenge.” This Gateway edition, then, engages in a larger debate about Smith’s significance. Situating the oval framed portrait of Smith within a rectangular frame, it visually reframes Smith, insisting on his classic authority as an eighteenth-century economist.

Smith’s broad appeal is also exemplified by editions celebrating his book with forewords by British politicians representing different political parties. The front cover of the 2007 Harriman House edition is dominated by a globe, with the title and author’s name highlighted across the center of it in white on a blue band. Near the bottom of the globe, across the location of Chile and Argentina, the title specifies “Foreword by George Osborne,” followed by an indication that the introduction is by Jonathan B. Wright. The latter is a Professor of Economics in the Robins School of Business with a joint appointment in Global Studies at the University of Richmond. Those within the United Kingdom will be most familiar with Osborne as the Conservative MP for Tatton (2001–2017) who also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (2010–2016) and First Secretary of State (2015–2016). The front cover therefore presents this edition as concerned with both the scholarly theory and practical pursuit of global prosperity, a theme reinforced by Osborne’s Foreword: “Adam Smith’s genius was to address the eternal questions: how to increase the wealth of nations and how to improve the prosperity of peoples all over the world.” Osborne also emphasizes that “society as a whole benefits from private enterprise.” Above all, he notes that to read the Wealth of Nations is “to invite inspiration to fight for free and open markets,” “to develop solutions and policies that increase individual freedoms,” and “to implement policies that increase the wealth of nations and peoples the world over.”Footnote ⁴¹

The back cover of the Harriman House edition recalls Smith’s political purpose in the Wealth of Nations: “First published in March of 1776, Adam Smith wrote the book to influence a special audience—the British Parliament—and its arguments in the early spring of that year pressed for peace and cooperation with Britain’s colonies rather than war.” In this context, Osborne’s foreword assumes additional resonance, especially its emphasis on fighting “economic nationalism.” Apparently, members of Parliament still see themselves as benefiting from Smith’s wisdom. The back cover also warns that “protectionism preserved the status quo, and privileged a few elites at the expense of long-term growth.” It concludes: “[T]his classic work is as essential today as it was when it [was] first written,” a point seemingly affirmed by the book’s preface by a member of Parliament in 2007.Footnote ⁴²

In the same year, Gordon Brown of the Labour Party became prime minister on June 27, 2007, a position he held until May 11, 2010. Two years after resigning that post, Brown wrote the foreword to the 2012 Kirkcaldy Edition of Wealth of Nations. The front cover of that edition features a profile of Adam Smith in a blue coat superimposed over an image of a town in grayscale (presumably Kirkcaldy). This cover also advertises “a Foreword by The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP” and introduction and editing by Bob Carruthers. Brown’s foreword continues this local emphasis, focusing on the significance of Smith growing up and later again living in Kirkcaldy, where he could see the seashore: “Understanding what Adam Smith saw as he looked out from his home, is the key to comprehending what lay behind his brilliant discovery in ‘The Wealth of Nations.’” Specifically, Smith saw ships:

The back cover emphasizes Smith’s position as “one of the ‘Greatest Scots’ of all time” along with this illustrated edition’s preparation by Emmy award-winning author Bob Carruthers, who also wrote the Introduction. In it, Carruthers acknowledges: “On the surface the link between a Socialist Prime Minister and the man who championed the invisible hand of the free market is contradictory. However, to adopt that view is to misunderstand both the work of Adam Smith and the new foundation created by Gordon.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Brown indeed promoted the Adam Smith Global Foundation in Kirkcaldy, and his charitable work overall led him to becoming a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in June 2024.

The covers of these editions present different visions of Smith’s book and are further inflected by the disagreements captured in materials such as lectures, videos, and advertisements. (In Paratexts, Genette calls such materials “epitexts.”) For instance, Osborne has delivered speeches criticizing Brown’s ministry and the debt accumulated during it.Footnote ⁴⁵ Conversely, Brown suggests that Smith’s arguments align with New Labour’s views on trade, taxation, and inflation, a view that Simon Glaze analyzes.Footnote ⁴⁶ What cannot be disputed is that such editions offer readers a wealth of views.

In fact, in many cases, editions of the Wealth of Nations are not only presenting Smith but claiming him for a range of purposes. We can read this book more deliberately when we are aware of how book covers and other paratexts frame our reading of it. They might be chosen to capture a particular point in Wealth of Nations, to reinforce a prejudice about wealth, to argue with others about Smith’s significance, to appeal to readers’ desire for education, or even to create a sense of refinement. Often, covers are chosen simply for profit, not to convey anything meaningful about the Wealth of Nations. In the end, the only way really to understand Smith’s Wealth of Nations is to release it from its paratextual trappings and just read it.